Building Up Activate Boston: Meet the Team
Last year was huge for Activate. Having supported Cyclotron Road, a program of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, since 2015, we knew there was a great need and strong demand for entrepreneurial research fellowships. Last August, following many months of preparation, we announced a new fellowship site: Activate Boston.
We are thrilled to be building out a second node in a city so rich in smart, innovative scientists and technologists, and are excited to introduce you to two of them: Activate Boston’s managing director Aimee Rose and fellowship manager Lakshana Huddar.
Aimee Rose, managing director, Activate Boston
Aimee joined the team last September, after learning about the opportunity through a LinkedIn post. “I started reading about Activate and it really resonated with me on so many different levels, from my professional goals to my personal experiences, especially because I had lived through a technology spin-out process—from academia to product development to worldwide sales—and had the battle scars to prove it,” she says.
Indeed, Aimee would have made a perfect candidate for an Activate fellowship, if only the program was available when she completed her Ph.D. in chemistry at MIT. As part of her doctorate research, Aimee developed sensor technology that she ended up commercializing. FLIR Systems acquired the tech, and she then spent almost a decade with the firm.
“There are many things that I learned on the job that I’m excited to bring to bear in supporting our fellows,” she says. “One of those is fundraising … and the concept of customer discovery and understanding what the market needs. Having a more streamlined, structured, quantitative process would have helped us get to the right product faster.”
Lakshana Huddar, fellowship manager, Activate Boston
Aimee’s first hire, fellowship manager Lakshana Huddar, brings very relevant experience, coming off a two-year stint as an ARPA-E fellow, where she led efforts to develop programs ranging from enhanced geothermal systems to deep sea mining for critical minerals. It’s perhaps not the most obvious career path for someone with a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering, but even before completing her studies at UC Berkeley, Lakshana knew she didn’t want to work in a lab and that she really wanted to take a wider view of the spectrum of technologies that can address low- or no-carbon energy needs, globally.
“Being at ARPA-E was a great way of basically increasing the breadth of my knowledge in this space and it gave me freedom to explore whatever I wanted in energy technologies. I realized the impact of transforming lab work—purely academic work—to something that is commercializable.”
Aimee and Lakshana have been thinking a lot about what kind of culture they want to foster at Activate Boston. ”I would love Activate Boston to be a collaborative environment,” says Lakshana. “We’re not trying to compete with incubators or VCs, we want to learn from them and make our own niche. An important part of our model is interacting with all the fellows at a really deep level and trying to be useful wherever we can be, so the fellows can work on their projects and be successful. I’d like to leverage the people in the Boston area—folks who have been really successful in tech and industry in general—and try to use them as resources. There are lots of amazing people here in Boston. It’s all going to come down to the people, in the end.”
MIT Lincoln Laboratory, home to a world-class microelectronics lab, is an anchor partner for Activate Boston, thanks to an expanded commitment from DARPA to fund fellowships.
Our collaborators at MIT Lincoln Lab have been foundational to establishing the new node, says Aimee. “From conceptualization to execution their knowledge, expertise, and support has been critical to setting us up for success here.”
And thanks to generous support from Breakthrough Energy, we’ll also support fellows at Activate Boston whose work is focused on addressing climate change through low-carbon energy innovations. To support these fellows with facilities and expertise that complement those of MIT Lincoln Lab, Aimee and Lakshana are currently forging additional research partnerships—we’ll share more on that in the coming months.
“I’ve been delighted by how warmly we’ve been embraced by the local tech ecosystem and really look forward to leveraging those partnerships to the benefit of the fellows,” says Aimee.
Want to get involved with Activate Boston or our wider efforts? We’d love to connect! Drop a note to info@activate.org and check out these Activate job listings.
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Header illustration: humaaans by Pablo Stanley